Keep Calm and No Hold for Customer Service

High hold times for customer service phone calls is a plague in the customer service experience today. Too often by the time customers reach an agent, customers have had to wait so long that the experience is ruined.

According to onholdwith.com (a site that catalogs complaints from Twitter users stuck on hold), telecommunications firms (phone, cable, Internet) and banking are often top offenders when it comes to NOT being truly available 24/7 to help a customer in need.

The problem is that not only are customers subjected to long hold times while service providers experience “unusually high volume of calls”, but when using IVRs and other contact channels, customers are reporting frequent disconnects and a lack of the promised call back.

The future of customer service looks bright

Fortunately, the future looks bright. Despite the ongoing problems we face today, not everyone has just given up and decided that this will be a fact of life. Companies like Fonolo, a call-back service providers, have set out to kill the dreaded customer service hold time.

The emphasis is not just on the customer service delivery, but in delivering positive business impact to your organization. Solutions today emphasize in:

• Eliminating on hold time
• Lowering agent handle time
• Enhancing service reputation
• Boosting call center productivity
• Increasing sales
• Cloud based 24/7 availability
• Instant feedback to customers
• Measurable ROI to the organization

By organizing, aligning, utilizing, and enhancing phone, email, live chat, social media, and self service customer service options, we can change the way customer service is done.

A multi-channel approach is the answer

I’m excited to see what the future has in store for customer service. It’s been my mission to showcase how customer service should be done and that it CAN be done so that exceptional customer experiences actually happen, creating massive customer loyalty.

At DigiCert, an SSL Certificate and authentication service provider, we have 0 hold time, 0 phone queues, and top-tier technical customer support team members available to answer ANY customer question 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. While we currently have been able to handle our inbound customer support request through our traditional phone calls, we rely on a multi-channel approach of phone, email, live chat, and social media in order to be available to our customers when, where, and how they want.